Saturday, November 19, 2016

TORRENTS and KASHMIR

I don't know the name of the founder or the owner of the Kickass-Torrents site, and frankly, I never bothered about it. There was no Wikipedia entry on where he went to school. Did his ancestors come to America on a ship or an Alien craft? Nobody knows or cares. All I wanted is to just find the damn torrent, hook it to the Bit torrent and just wait till the download was complete. Nobody batted an eyelid and everything was hunky dory. I even thought it was all in good faith and purely legal. There were a couple of banners on the site saying get a VPN to avoid getting tracked. But, we the people of India are very well aware of the tech savviness of our Police. Plus, who gets arrested for downloading a movie. No one.

The site had so many amazing features, you could search the movie by the genre and even by the actor's name. I remember once searching for Collin Farell movies and stumbling upon a gem of a movie called In Bruges. What a movie it was. It was never released in India. None of my friends and immediate circle had even heard of it. I would have probably died in my late 90s without even watching it had it not for the kickass Torrents.

Now, that it is gone, I fondly recall it the way a man recalls his past flames during the mid-age crisis. A question comes to our mind, that why out of the blue was this gentleman, who was doing more good to people than the last 20 Presidents of United States of America combined, was arrested that too in a remote country in Europe. This rings a lot of bells.

Well, once again our friends in WikiLeaks have found the answer. The have gained access to the trove of emails exchanged between Kickass torrents and CIA. Without killing your perfect night with more boring emails, I will cut to the chase and explain the whole scenario in simple English.

It has come to light, that our hero and CIA had a pact, a long-standing one. In lieu of the immunity from any kind of prosecution, CIA wanted some simple coordinates from him. What they would do with those coordinates, well that was none of his business.

Every day millions of people would go to the site and download whatever caught their fancy. I want to believe that he never tracked the downloaders or anything like that. But, he could locate the source of the download if he wanted to and make a note of the IP address. The same, if used correctly could easily lead to the physical location. This was gold for NSA and CIA.

We all know what is happening in the Middle East. ISIS has occupied huge land mass, oil fields, and treasures. But, in all these war times, even terrorists want some relaxation. Even though ISIS Talent hunt team is working day and night to recruit more gullible girls, but the demand always exceeded the supply. Often these terrorists during night time, like many of us, used to open their laptops and go to the Kickass-Torrent site and look for the latest XXX video uploaded. This led CIA to their location, because who else would be downloading porn in the ISIS controlled Iraq.

This partnership went successfully for the last couple of years. But, something tipped off our hero and refused to be the source of these drone hits and he went AWOL. Unfortunately, not everyone is lucky as Snowden. He was caught on the border while exchanging his passport for a safe passage. Rest is history. Suddenly, we wake up and find that the site no longer works.

Kashmir:

That was that and let's come back to India and try to understand what is actually going on in Kashmir from the last couple of months. Things have really gone from bad to bat-shit crazy in just a couple of months.

As far as Kashmiris are concerned the only major group or the section which they kind of fear is Jan Sangh, the erstwhile name of BJP-RSS cult. And it was only natural for them to react to the PDP-BJP coalition. If you see from the year 2008. There has been a cycle of some sort to bring every Chief Minister to his/her knees. It first started with Ghulam Nabi Azad, then Omar Abdullah and now Mehbooba. These separatists rake up one issue after other bringing the entire social machinery to a grinding halt. This is their leverage. That is why they are airlifted to AIIMS even for a butt- wart. They are invited to every Indo-Pak Banquet. This is their power. They want the Indian government to make a deal with them to stop shutting down their own city. And boy! haven't successive governments been just doing that?

It may come as a surprise to many, but there have been reports in the newspapers that Army officers negotiate for peace with the henchmen of these separatists. Imagine that. Money flows from the treasury to their coffers and for what?

But, this time around. We have a seasoned hawk in the PMO. Ajit Doval. The man who doesn't give in. He has actually called their bluff. How long can you shut-down? How long can you reimburse the common man for his loss of livelihood? How long can you expect people to support when your start burning the schools of their children? Just how long? It is 126 days now. And in this eyeball to eyeball situation the hawk eye of Doval is never going to blink.

All credit to PM Modi for having such no-nonsense people around him in PMO. He hand-picked Jitendra Singh as MoS PMO J&K State BJP unit. Jitendra Singh is a diabetologist who has been treating Kashmiri Pandits for almost two decades. After the migration, a huge percentage of Kashmiris unable to adjust to the new exile fell prey to hypertension, diabetes, and migraine. He has been a live witness to all this. One more thing about this gentleman. He has been a regular columnist for 25 years in the premier newspaper Daily Excelsior in J&K. Every Sunday I used to straight away turn to the editorial page to read his column Travesty of truth.

And while one may be tempted to call him an arm-chair strategist, but his election record proves otherwise. He slam-dunked the former CM of Jammu and Kashmir, Ghulam Nabi Azad in a straight fight.

These two gentlemen, Doval and Singh, know the inside out of these separatists and are dealing with them the way it should be. They were the brain-trust behind the mention of Balochistan in the Independence speech of Modi. This took some heat off India regarding the Kashmir issue and put Pakistan under the international microscope.

My two paisa on this is that government should wait for this siege out. Let the people of the Kashmir understand that where would this stalemate lead them. Who is the real loser in this fight? Are separatists losing anything? Nope, they have their regular supply from the hawala. Their kids are studying in foreign countries. This stand-off only gives them international exposure. Is is the Indian government going to get affected? The truth is no. J&K is a heat sink. With their GDP they cannot even pay the salaries of the mammoth army of the Public Servants. The private sector is non-existent. 80% of the population doesn't pay the taxes So, for Indian it just means a change of plan for the summer vacations, nothing more. Hope this actually etches onto minds and they can see truth from bullshit.